Peter Maher's Yeah Baby Night

May 25, 1989. A few hours before the biggest game the Calgary Flames have ever played, a man in a suit crosses the street to the Alexis Nihon Plaza, finds the liquor store, and buys three miniature bottles of champagne. He puts them in his attaché case. Then he walks over to the Montreal Forum to go to work.

He told that story himself, years later, in his own column, so it is not something the old-timers handed down. Peter Maher packed champagne to a hockey game because he thought he might need it, and he was right.

Maher died on Thursday. He was 79. The Flames announced it that afternoon, saying the organization acknowledged the passing of “the legendary voice of the Flames,” which is the sort of phrase clubs reach for and, in this case, happens to be the plain truth. Thirty-three straight seasons on the radio. One Stanley Cup. He called it.

For the record

Peter Maher took over Flames play-by-play in the club’s second season in Calgary, 1981-82, following Bart Dailley behind the microphone. Doug Barkley sat beside him on colour for the next two decades. His last Flames broadcast was April 13, 2014. In 2006 the Hockey Hall of Fame named him a media honouree with the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award, which is the broadcaster’s recognition rather than induction as an Honoured Member, a distinction worth keeping straight because almost nobody does.

In between, on one Thursday night in Montreal, he had the best three hours of work anybody in his chair has ever had in this city.

The night

Colin Patterson opened it at 18:51 of the first, off Dana Murzyn and Al MacInnis. Claude Lemieux answered 83 seconds into the second and the Forum got loud in the way that building could get loud.

Then Lanny McDonald came out of the penalty box, took a pass from Joe Nieuwendyk, and scored at 4:24. It was the last goal of his career.

Doug Gilmour got the winner at 11:02 of the third on the power play, Joel Otto and MacInnis assisting. Rick Green pulled one back at 11:53. Gilmour sealed it into an empty net at 18:57. Flames 4, Canadiens 2, and the Cup went home with the visitors.

What the man remembered

Here is the part that tells you what Peter Maher was actually for.

In 2018, twenty-nine years after the fact, he sat down with The Athletic and walked through that game from memory. Patterson getting the first one. Montreal tying it up. Lanny coming out of the box, taking that pass from Nieuwendyk. Gilmour getting the winner, then getting another one late to seal it.

Go back and read the scoring summary above. He had it in order, and he had the Nieuwendyk assist, almost three decades later, without notes in front of him.

That is not a party trick. That is a man who spent his working life turning a game into words fast enough to keep up with it, and who never quite put down the ones that mattered. He called that night the one that topped it all. He said being there to broadcast it was a huge thrill, and that he would never forget it. He was telling the truth about the second part.

He also remembered something that had nothing to do with hockey. The home team had lost, in a building not used to it, and most of the crowd stayed anyway. When the Cup came out and Lanny carried it around the ice, the Forum stood up and cheered a team from Alberta. Maher figured three-quarters of them were still in their seats. Of all the things to hold onto from the best night of your career, he held onto the manners of the other team’s fans.

Three cries

The trademark was “Yeah, baby.” As Maher told CBC in 2018, it was born out of his lips in 1986, the idea arriving on the morning of Game 6 of the Smythe Division Final against Edmonton. He was the only source for that origin story and he told it the same way every time, which is about as good as these things get.

The Calgary Sun, looking back thirty years on, wrote that he marked the Stanley Cup triumph with three consecutive cries of it. Three. He saved them up all spring and spent them all at once.

The part where the scrapbook page is missing

Now the uncomfortable bit, and the reason this page took some digging.

If you want to hear the television call of that night, you can have it in about four seconds. It is in a vault, it gets licensed, it runs in every anniversary package the league and the networks put out, and it will outlive all of us.

If you want to hear Peter Maher call the Calgary Flames winning the Stanley Cup, there is no institution in this country that can help you.

Not Library and Archives Canada. Not the Provincial Archives of Alberta. Not the Glenbow. Not the Hockey Hall of Fame. Not the Flames. Not the company that owns his old station now, and not the one that closed his last station this July. We went looking through all of them. There is no catalogue entry, no master, no access copy, nothing to request.

What survives is a partial recording of the third period that a private collector kept and put online, which is to say the most famous broadcast in the history of Calgary radio exists today because somebody at home in 1989 pressed record and then held onto the tape for thirty-seven years.

No broadcaster has ever re-aired it. Not on the twentieth anniversary, not the twenty-fifth, not the thirtieth, not the thirty-fifth. Every one of those productions reached for the pictures.

One more thing the record wants fixed

You will read, in a lot of places, that the 1989 Flames were the only visiting team ever to win the Stanley Cup on Forum ice. It is not quite right, and it has never been right. The 1928 New York Rangers won a Cup in that building against the Montreal Maroons.

The true version is still remarkable and still ours: Calgary is the only visiting team that ever won the Stanley Cup on Montreal Canadiens home ice.

The overreach is not some modern anniversary drift, either. The Los Angeles Times printed it the morning after the game, calling the Flames the first visiting team to win the Cup on Montreal ice. Wrong inside twenty-four hours, and copied ever since. Maher, for what it is worth, was on the air that night getting the goals right.

Why the page still matters here

The radio broadcast booth at the Scotiabank Saddledome is named for Peter Maher.

That building has one season left. Then the Flames move down the road to Scotia Place, and the Saddledome comes down, and the room with his name on the door goes with it.

He got the last word on the best night this franchise ever had, and the tape of it survives on the kindness of a stranger with a cassette. Nobody thought to keep it, because on May 25, 1989 nobody in Calgary was thinking about archives. They were listening.

Three cries of “Yeah, baby,” into a microphone in Montreal, for a city eleven hundred miles away that had waited its whole life to hear it.

The Calgary Flames on the passing of Peter Maher, August 2026

Independent commentary. Not affiliated with the Calgary Flames or the NHL. Scoring details verified against the official game record. Peter Maher's recollections are quoted from his own 2012 Sportsnet column and 2018 interviews with The Athletic and CBC. Flames Scout Wire has not heard the surviving recording of the radio broadcast and does not quote it.